Great Basin Temperature Profile Wells

The Great Basin of the southwestern United States was the focus of concerted exploration and leasing activity by the geothermal power industry beginning in the 1970’s. Chevron Geothermal and Phillips Petroleum Company together evaluated more than 75 geothermal prospects with a potential for accessible temperature of 150 °C or greater. More than 25 additional sites were assessed by other companies, bringing the total number of potentially high-temperature sites evaluated by industry to more than 100.

Most of the subsurface temperature data from the Chevron/Phillips projects were purchased by CalEnergy Inc. during the summer of 1998, the CalEnergy holdings were inventoried by USGS personnel, and subsurface temperature data from several hundreds of those holes were purchased by the U.S. Department of Energy for curation by Idaho National Engineering and ENvironmental Laboratory (INEEL). As part of that transaction, the USGS agreed to digitize the data and make them available on the World Wide Web.

This dataset combines the data set acquired from CalEnergy, with miscellaneous data from Geothermal Resources International (GEO), Aminoil USA, AMAZ and other companies which were acquired by the USGS from INEEL in 1995, and make them available to any interested user via this web site. All data were obtained using calibrated thermister probes having an accuracy of about 0.1 °C. The data as received were in a variety of formats and units, with most locations listed as Section, Township, and Range. They were primarily copies of field data sheets, but some were in interpretive reports, and other were analogue temperature-depth plots at various scales. Gradient values shown in the database were obtained directly from the field data sheets or plots. These were usually based on a visual straight-line fit of the data from the lowermost section of the hole. After a few random checks of these estimates, we adopted these values for our presentation.

For more information and to download the original dataset, please visit the USGS at: http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1999/of99-425/webmaps/home.html